15 Minutes of Disconnect a Day Keeps the Doctor Away
In a world where public transportation has been privatized, Layl creates different spaces for relaxation while commuting. This makes us the only organization that offers a meditative and tech-free city bus experience for working-class individuals who need a break from an increasingly endless stream of technological overload.
Backstory, 2017 — present.
In the near future, the quality of public transportation in San Francisco has decreased. Prices in transportation went up as the service and security got worse. Those changes were caused by the earthquake that happened in Northern California in 2021, leading to extreme government financial debt.
Concurrently, several automobile and technology companies remained firm investors in road policy research and design, creating a competition between public transportation and rising private companies. The need for improvement and the readiness of the private companies caused a power shift. Hence private companies began to take more control of the system.
By the year 2022, all public transportation in California becomes officially privatized. Companies like Tesla, Google, and Uber were some of the main investors that took advantage of the opportunity in 2021. Those changes in policy caused a quick transition in the way people thought about public transportation. Multiple forms of public transportation were available for the public to choose from, which forced the quality of service to rise due to the highly competitive market.
There was also a strong yet gradual increase in how regular people used public transportation as well as what percentage of the public did. The enhancement of quality wasn’t the only reason though. First, sharing a private ride with strangers going to a similar destinations had become very acceptable socially. Especially as the automatic algorithms connecting commuters together became more specific and not dependent solely on destination, but also based on personality and shared interest.
Another reason causing the increase was the impact of global warming awareness. In July 2024, almost every country in the world joined an international decision to fight global warming immediately as the side effects became a lot more evident. That meant the responsibility of a person towards reducing energy spending had become strictly enforced. That force was applied in many ways, one of which was by making it harder and more expensive for a person to own a vehicle, especially in the city.
The third reason people started depending on private-public forms of transportation was the existence of the success of autonomous cars by the end of 2025. The construction of both the underground roads and the e-roads that are used only by autonomous cars were finally completed, which consequently caused a shift in the experience of driving a car. The reduction in the interest in actually driving a car decreased, again causing people to choose public transportation as a way of saving money and energy.
A study done eighteen years ago at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine shows that the human retina can transmit visual input at about the same rate as an Ethernet connection. In digital terms, according to their calculations, on a normal basis, our eyes take in roughly 4.5 gb of information an hour. On top of that, the social dependence on technology in every aspect of the urban life continued to increase greatly over the last 10 years. From the moment we wake up to bedtime, loads of information enter our minds; some of them uncontrollably. As the exhaustion of the mind becomes an acceptable norm in a city life, the need for meditation has become more obvious. This has led to the development of highly advanced meditation spaces and businesses to come to life.
The need for meditation did not come as a surprise, we saw it coming for a long time. One of the earliest documented attempts to integrate meditation in public transportation was ten years ago in London. In January 2017, riots formed in London’s subway systems as a way to stand against the unfair work conditions subway workers were experiencing. Therefore, a meditative city bus was created by athletic apparel brand Lululemon, as a way to help passengers relief stress caused by the riots.
Epilogue:
Layl started with a simple exercise of studying my daily commute from Daly City, California to San Francisco. I decided to focus on transportation because it’s a regular activity that takes a big chunk of our time and focus, for a task that is easy and rhythmic for the most part. Also, I just really like to meditate! That said, autonomous cars were my first thought, not meditation. My goal was to find a way to create a commute experience not focused on just getting from point A to point B, but a mobile space for various activities including meditation. But then I felt like I had to get more specific and choose one activity: meditation. It was something I really wished I could do during my commute even though it didn’t seem realistic in the present form of transportation. But the fun aspect of this exercise was that it takes place in a different form in the future, a future that I created. So suddenly my argument did not have to stop because the means were not there yet. Instead, its a starting point to a future where we have more control of how it looks.
